Characters
A fireman and the book's protagonist.
Who is Guy Montag?
Represents destruction as well as self-awareness and knowledge.
What is fire?
And in her ears, the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind.
What is Metaphor?
I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together"
This theme involves the government's strict control of media.
What is censorship?
He has committed to memory many passages of classic literature and can quote them at will. He is Montag's Boss.
Represents life that follows death through the cleansing of flames. Prevalent in many Mediterranean cultures.
What is the Phoenix?
Surely you remember the boy in your own school class who was exceptionally ‘bright,’ did most of the reciting and answering while the others sat like so many leaden idols, hating him.
What is a simile?
"One drop of rain. Clarisse. Another drop. Mildred. A third. The uncle. A fourth. The fire tonight"
Who is Montag?
The struggle between individuals who want to learn and a society that values ignorance and conformity.
What is knowledge vs ignorance?
She drowns her unhappiness with pills and a constant barrage of media, fast driving, and other mindless distractions.
Who is Mildred Montag?
Both are traditionally associated with fire. The title of part 1.
What is Hearth and Salamander?
Next thing they were up in musty blackness swinging silver hatchets at doors that were, after all, unlocked, tumbling through like boys all rollick and shout.
"It doesn't think anything we don't want it to think"
Who is Beatty?
The influence of government-sponsored and corporate media on how people think.
What is mass media?
A former English professor who describes himself as a coward because he did not act to try to change the direction in which society was headed.
Who is Faber?
One of these represents Montag's mind and the other represents the knowledge he seeks.
What is Sieve and Sand?
Stoneman and Black drew forth their rule books, which also contained brief histories of the Firemen of America, and laid them out where Montag, though long familiar with them, might read: Established, 1790, to burn English-influenced books in the Colonies. First Fireman: Benjamin Franklin.
What is an allusion?
I’m one of the innocents who could have spoken up and out when no one would listen to the ‘guilty,’ but I did not speak and thus became guilty myself. And when finally they set the structure to burn the books, using the firemen, I grunted a few times and subsided, for there were no others grunting or yelling with me, by then. Now, it’s too late.
Who is Faber?
The author treats this as inherently anesthetizing and destructive.
What is technology?
Montag's teenaged neighbor.
Who is Clarisse?
The temperature at which paper burns.
What is Fahrenheit 451?
The Mechanical Hound slept but did not sleep, lived but did not live in its gently humming, gently vibrating, softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse.
What is irony?
“It’s perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it’d burn our lifetimes out.”